The Whale As Event

This crisis for another
Bubble tumbled in your breath
We saw it down as real

Blubber insisting memory
Is action, action is
Engenderment the all-

Chaos all the time
A holey space singular in
Which journey number had only

This sinking

Body with which to see
Felt movement to hear
Chases with the Open--another

Horizon here confusing
Seizure with action, thought
With will haste with

Being slow--the broken
Ship becomes a promise--
Floating back to fathom each.

Parsing

Possibly, in earlier pieces, I used the body as a proof that "I" was there -- the way a person might talk to himself in the dark. So, with that assumption -- that the body was analogous to a word-system as a placement device -- there was an attempt made to "parse" the body: it could be the subject of an action, or it could be the receiver, the object (it should be noted that most of the earlier pieces were kinds of reflexive sentences: "I" acted on "me."
~ Vito Acconci

This vol-ume, turns up in-to, the art-il-lery, a wak-ing
From sense, no one wants, pri-va-tion to be blown
Up, or the bo-dy's "ar-mor," so we don't stop for, his-tory
This is the, his-tory of an e-mo-tion, pan-to-mim-ing,

Pars-ing, in the ring, a per-son, moves, move-ment,
Is this one, a one, for im-a-ges, of the mak-ing,
Bod-i-ly, not when-ever, where, a per-son, was,
"I" pauses, is, is not a con-cept, but in think-ing, I wish-es
To mark, a thick of the street, thicker glimpse, sound

Sounds ap-pa-rent, a pa-rent fre-quen-cy, all bright of
Each in, trans-i-gence, here was called, to, switch,
Space, that, one called, a-round all, en-dan-gered,
Lis-ten-ing, the twist, is, where we are, the ex-tra sun,

Not eats, think-ing to its, lapse, lips or of this one,
Idea, of out-ward, fold a cone, folds, a koan, the
Bo-dy, what was, the bo-dy, once, "I" sang, it-self in-to
Be-ing, by, mak-ing com-mon, here, by mak-ing, the only
Rule, when-ever one, is there, or here hur-ries, a-ler-ter,

With light by, wri-ting falls, from all, by the world is
Lan-guage, is not the only world, such joints, for being this
Bo-dy in space, be-com-ing, hes-i-tat-ed, which-ever
Is when, in move-ment fall-ing, in cam-er-a to grass.

If that fire would burn...

If that fire would burn
Or if we were ignited
To that place over your head
No longer forced to rule

Where no rocks are this is
Not a game or no one was
That any one could come
Back these images flood me

A body there in certain
Selves I heard your voice
At once so there was
No more world to tell about.

Elka Krajewska and Alan Licht's *Plany Mela* (Review)

To See 360 Degrees: Elka Krajewska and Alan Licht’s Plany Mela

Anyway, we used their equipment, but not the way they originally intended, and the star projector was the least of it.
~ Jordan Belsen in conversation with Scott MacDonald

On April 21st, 2007 Elka Krajewska premiered her collaboration with Alan Licht, *Plany Mela*, at the Bristol IMAX Dome Theatre at the Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science & Technology in Syracuse for the Syracuse International Film and Video Festival. As the lights went down in the hemispheric theater, a theater specified to show films in the 70 x 15mm corporate IMAX format, appeared a large pink wheel abuzz with shapes and iconic images steadily rotating as it also quivered. *Plany Mela’s* audience encountered this sphere as a dazzling abstraction the very antithesis of what one normally sees in IMAX theaters—those flight simulators for the virtual civilian, vision machines for titillating spectacle and representative information. After a mere ninety seconds Krajewska’s IMAX film concluded. At the center where the pink wheel was one now saw a sparse black and white video projection of simple moving shapes (squares, rectangles, circles, etc.) and the letters “I” and “N”. The film would only play again twice—a fleeting hijack of high-end corporate media spectacle by avant garde experimentalism.

Informing this dramatic movement between IMAX format and black and white video are the experiments of Mikhail Matiushin (1866-1934), a Russian artist nearly lost to our attention if not for a handful of paintings and the artist’s famous collaboration with Malevitch, Khlebnikov and others, *Victory Over the Sun*, for which he composed the music. In his work, Matiushin explored perceptual and sensual experience combining spiritual exercise and scientific experiment. Through this exploration Matiushin would train the sensorium and subtle faculties to experience synaesthesia and other super-sensory phenomena by effort, technique, practice and study: that is, voluntarily. Says Margaretta Tillberg, a Matiushin scholar: *the fundamental concepts of Matiushin's worldview were called "Organic Culture" and "Spatial Realism", which were also the names of the workshops he supervised as a "red professor". Here Matiushin developed a training programme together with his students, including yoga, meditation and various exercises conceived to "create and develop the artist". These new physical possibilities of perception were called "extended" or "amplified vision" which did not only include the eyes, but was expanded to involve hearing, tactility, and thinking - in short, a kind of conscious synaesthesia.*

Two projects I understand to inform Krajewska’s and Licht’s *Plany Mela* are Matiushin’s experiments in synaesthesia, as well as on central and peripheral visual phenomena. In their coordination of visual-acoustic elements Krajewska and Licht induce seeing as hearing and hearing as seeing where Licht’s use of “reverb” and other effects provide for a tonal afterimage the counterpart of afterimages one may attain through Krajewska’s thrice shown hallucinatory film (once at the beginning, a second in the middle interposed video, once in conclusion). Likewise, in the alternation between peripheral IMAX film and centered black and white video the viewer is faced with a perceptual dilemma of how one should simultaneously attend focus and blur, moving and inanimate elements, color and shape. Here a chiasmus is constituted whereby center may become peripheral, motion stagnant, focus deformational, spatial objects time-based and vibratory—i.e., qualities their inverse. This chiasmus locates the viewer-initiate at the limits of sense experience where sense gives way to subtler faculties. *With a panoramic visual angle of 360° producing a new spatial reality of the fourth dimension, colours would emerge more intensely than in our normal, physical world. With untrained eyes a stone, for example, would seem 'dead', immobile, static. In the fourth dimension, however, it should be possible to see the low frequency waves of solid materials such as stones and minerals. With cars at one speed, people at another, trees growing at yet a third speed, to the untrained eye, the world seems scattered and fragmented. For those who could apply the extended vision however, the whole world would, from an ontological perspective, appear completely different, with all links and connections organically unified.* (Tillberg)

If there is a central movement in the visual portion of *Plany Mela* it is between center and periphery where video attempts to shape the vision, to *in*-form it after one’s recent memory of the film. That the film should play three times makes the audience adjust their reception of the film in relation to the video and soundtrack. Here video should assist the memory being reorganized after the intense actuality of the original film stimulus. Significantly, the premiere of the film at the Syracuse International Film and Video Festival should also be the first time Krajewska would view the film she had been crafting with digital animation software for months, as though she would like to remember her own film for the first time before her audience, thus perform memory as it was occurring. She would attempt this performance twice amidst the film’s audience on a platform in the center of the unlit theater by arranging a series of shapes and stencil letters upon a masque while controlling a mixer, blending video triggered by Licht’s instruments and programmed elements with her improvisation upon the masque.

In the fall of 2006, before she was to make *Plany Mela*, Krajewska traveled for ninety days along the Polish border presenting to strangers her initial perceptual experiments for what would become the film and in turn collecting video footage of the people she would meet and interview during her travels. Having seen some of this footage it is astonishing how open complete strangers are to Krajewska as they dress her in family heirlooms they’ve fitted for her, share their artwork, poems, and birdcalls, and most of all tell their stories for her camera. Such footage is a testimony to Krajewska’s own openness and spontaneous generosity as it gathers the actualities of others, involving them in what she has cited alongside *Plany Mela* as a larger work of “structured abandoned” and “exposure”. This work that traverses stimulation and response, memory and percept, reflection and action, encounter and account, here and elsewhere, I and you is a glass for our attempts to regard ourselves while maintaining a world in movement.

Works Cited:
Jordon Belsen and Scott MacDonald. MacDonald, Scott ed. *A Critical Cinema 3*. University of California Press, 1998.
Tillberg, Margaretta. “The Russian Avant-Garde and Colour as Worldview”. http://www.iscc.org/aic2001/abstracts/oral/Tillberg.doc.

Fake Talking Real Talking (Listening to Steve Benson)*

Repudiation of the morning. The innuendo of slight grand. Why I might be tall and. I think about things with. The eyes holding a book to. Not break them to generate. Our ability to be written in. Advance ankle movement. Positing a challenge between. The body acting it out I. Am thinking aloud anywhere. The body on the page. How are you I'm tortured. The revelry of doldrums as. A species on the whole. I can't see each other. To think speaking the. Northern coast of Maine. Not to the body we don't. Use those words to think. A prosthesis to your nervous. System such writing is. An extension or as I imagine. It surfaces a prosodic membrane. More on that later. I couldn't quite hear if. We didn't have a body we. Would not have to exist. Out of balance relaxing it. Let's it's a nervous lace. That's how I think with. Other people's experiences yet. Porous there is an exchange. Of the body becoming what. It isn't of looking going in. Parts that are coordinated. Into which things come reading. Matter always in some slow. Motion everywhere at different. Times in projections skin. Boundaries up there in motion. Again and again and again. Preoccupied we are thinking. Make it successful sensory. Danger semblance there used. To be an idea of the then. Collapsing limited now. The body everywhere the. Body is exhausted it doesn't. Know to focus on poetry. In question the wind's intraceable.

*composed during the Segue series panel, "Language Poetry and the Body"

...and the body*

Cut it thru the author
Like an ear that had lost its power
Loving to fuck on the beach
Loving to fuck the beach

Seabirds drenched in trauma
Human interest that is
Nonetheless linking I author
It with plenty of negation
To become the lovechild space

*composed during the Segue series panel, "Language Poetry and the Body"

A Reason To Believe In This World

Consequentially the
Cartooned ground
Of ideology gives out

Another subject hangs
Over a cliff but there
Is this to believe in

The way you reached for
Me so unsymbolically or
Sometimes disappear

From my eyes a "pro-
visional termini" if we
Are here at all let us be

For this "quasi-chaos"
Not mistaking their
Land grabs for the real.

What Beauty (II)

What angels see

Anamorph of trees

Birches beware

Things here

Fall back to life

PROSODIC BODY ADMIXTURE #2

MAY 26th at 8:30 PM
PROSODIC BODY ADMIXTURE #2

Poet Film Maker Abigail Child
The Future is Behind You creates a fictional story composed from an
anonymous family archive from 1930’s Europe, reconstructed to emphasize
gender acculturation in two sisters who play, race, fight, kiss and
grow up together under a shadow of oncoming history. At once biography
and fiction, history and psychology, THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU excavates
gestures to explore the speculative seduction of narrative; it seeks a
bridge between private and public histories.

Dance artist Melanie Maar
-Leo recuerda Duende-
is provoking the past in the present body
is conducting a family history of dance and
movement disorder through space
is happening in a circle of people
is about letting it appear first, recognizing then
is a dance.

Dancer/choreographer Yves Musard will present bits of movement from his
recent project in La Passerelle, Scene nationale of St Brieuc in
Brittany and will share the dimensions of his project as he experienced
it there.

Dancer/choreographers Daria Fain with Melanie Maar, Peter Sciscioli and
Laurence Schroeder in a Prosodic Body experimentation.
The Prosodic Body is an ongoing collaboration between choreographer
Daria Fain and architect/poet Robert Kocik based on their exploration
of language as a somatic (practice (the manifestation of language in
the body). In the restrictive definition of the word, ‘prosody’ is the
science of poetry and the study of speech intonation. Extending this
definition of prosody, Fain and Kocik opened an experiential field
called the prosodic body.

LOCATION 241 Bedford Ave. #7 -- Brooklyn, NY 11211
L train to bedford Ave. BTWN North 3rd and 4th - 1st floor
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Donation $5
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TEL: 718-450-1356
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I MAXed OUT

Come to this benefit to help out my friend Elka who recently presented a 90 second I MAX film at the Syracuse Planetarium...

TUESDAY May 22, 2006 starting at 6pm - come to witness Michael Portnoy perform live auction object transference,
hear Aki Onda play with multiple cassette Walkmans and electronics,
sample Chop Shop’s newest delicious bits,
touch the original celluloid of the 90-second, 4lb of 15/70 mm film that premiered at Bristol Imax 3 weeks ago,
see the documentary of “Plany Mela” screening,
and bid for art by

Sarah Oppenheimer, David Reed, Arnold Helbling, Guy Goodwin, Leah Gelpe, Ken Jacobs, Monika Wiechowska, Robert Chambers, Matt Luem, Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim, Marianne Vitale, Markus Draper, James Siena, Paulina Olowska, Julian Kreimer, discoteka flaming star, Michael Portnoy, Lary Seven
(artwork details at http://www.elka.net/IMAXauction.html)

at I MAXed OUT
http://www.elka.net/imaxedout.html
a fundraising auction for the future life of
“Plany Mela” 2007, a movie/performance for dome
a collaboration of Elka Krajewska and Alan Licht
premiered at Bristol Imax Dome on April 21, 2007
http://www.elka.net/BristolImax.html

day schedule for May 22, 2007:

12 - 6 pm works on view at M. Vitale Loft, 50 Delancey buzzer 4
6 - 8 pm silent auction
8 pm sharp – live auction of selected works performed by Michael Portnoy
9 pm – music performance by Aki Onda
9:30 – last 15 minutes of silent bids
9:45 – winners of silent auction announced

10 pm on – other attractions!



All regular silent auction rules apply, all works must be picked up after the bidding ends.
Suggested Admission $15.
with any questions contact : elka@elka.net

Little Red Leaves Vol. 1

The inaugural issue of Little Red Leaves features poems by Marcia
Arrieta, Derek Beaulieu, Jason Christie, Thom Donovan, Raymond Farr,
Skip Fox, Elisa Gabbert, Michalle Gould, Arielle Greenberg, Geoffrey
Hlibchuk, Victoria Hsieh, Ofelia Hunt, Laura Navratil, Francis Raven,
Larissa Shmailo, Elizabeth Treadwell, Sara Veglahn, and Joshua Marie
Wilkinson.

Issue one also includes a selection from the first Dos Press chapbook,
featuring poems by Hoa Nguyen, Carter Smith, and Andrea Strudensky.

www.littleredleaves.com
www.littleredleavesjournal.blogspot.com

Every Name (Piece)

How many degrees one felt the circle sing to us
The warble blend every personage you were
Every phylum you were not--

A timely ambivalence the inverse of chance
In the below of violence sudden above of obediance
I is not I any longer when it reflects while it acts.

For Matiushin

Some tankers and stars lapse some shade of
Resource always resource outsources our lips leak
Silence lay sense to waste intuit what other

Organs were here accomplice to apocalypse art its
Consequences are shapes you make in the dark
About-face non-images are for thinking a feeling

Won't break the back sound waves lapping like
The mind is heard here in not seeing nothing a
Total proprioception of the back as it turned.

Acephale (Man Thinking)

On the road
Again and
Headless

With a gun
For a brain
A mind's full

Of lack that
Wastes the
Isolate

Youth cult
With muscles
Bulging from

No where
One was on
Fire no fire

Was to speak
Of lovers
Bounced on

A bed they
Fulfill their
Deepest wills

Like they were
Our own fuck
Deeply to

The turn-
off gore true
Rubberneckers.

Peace On A presents: Robert Kocik & Jonathan Skinner (Intro)

“everlastingly themselves eidolons intellect garden”
~ Louis Zukofsky, from “A – 22”

Peace On A

presents

Robert Kocik & Jonathan Skinner*

Saturday, May 5th 2007 8PM
BYOB & recommended donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Robert Kocik poet, prosodist, artist, builder, lives in Brooklyn, NY, where he owns and operates the Bureau of Material Behaviors. Architecturally, the 'missing civic service' is his declared niche. He is currently involved in the design phases of the Preemptive Peace Place (an agency devoted to the permanent peace movement) and the Prosody Building (a building entirely attuned to the prosodic). His poetry plies what he refers to as 'burst prosody'--perfused by and propagating all things. His essays comprise the the nascent discipline known as the Sore, Oversensitive Sciences (SOS). Recent additions to SOS include: The Susceptive System and Stressogony. With choreographer Daria Fain he has initiated an experiential, aesthetic science named the Prosodic Body. His publications include: *Overcoming Fitness* (Autonomedia, 2001) and *Rhrurbarb* (Field Books, 2007).

Overcoming cure. Regardless.
Space is a function of finding
you. Your only exterior
my euphoria. Regardless.

With that with which it can’t be shown...
forming a residue—
a field of rhubarb and zinnias,
the dimensions of the workspace,
a boat-swallowing fish from
water drained from raccoon track.
~ from Robert Kocik’s *Rhrurbarb*

Jonathan Skinner publishes Field Books and edits the review ecopoetics (www.ecopoetics.org), teaches Environmental Studies at Bates College and lives in Bowdoinham, the tick capital of Maine. His *Political Cactus Poems* are available through Palm Press (www.palmpress.org).

SKEIN

on the Tift tarmac
a boisterous crowd of three
wearing rack and pinion
Canadensis is a fever
crowned with geese in the fall
does it come in grids
there and now, north south
breakfast on the wing heels
skidding to a marsh
~ from Jonathan Skinner’s *Political Cactus Poems*

Peace On A is an events series devoted to emergent work by writers, artists, performers and scholars. Past presenters at Peace on A include Alan Gilbert, E. Tracy Grinnell, Cathy Park Hong, Paolo Javier, Wayne Koestenbaum, Douglas Martin, Eléna Rivera, David Levi Strauss, Andrew Levy & Kyle Schlesinger. Scroll down Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) for back advertisements, introductions and reading selections.

*A launch for Robert Kocik's new book, RHRURBARB (Field Books, 130 pages, perfect-bound), the first in the Field Book imprint.

To order a copy of RHRURBARB send an address and $15 to:

Jonathan Skinner
111 Bardwell St.
Lewiston, ME 04240

*

Intro for Robert Kocik: We Have Decided Not to Survive (or How to Make a Prosodic Body?)

The point of view of an ethics is: of what are you capable, what can you do? Hence a return to this sort of cry of Spinoza’s: *what can a body do?* We never know in advance what a body can do. We never know how we’re organized and how the modes of existence are enveloped in somebody.
~ Gilles Deleuze, 1980 Course on “Ontology & Ethics”

Throughout Gilles Deleuze’s work he continually sounds the refrain of Spinoza: “what can a body do”? In Spinoza’s once recently “Enlightened” era the 17th century philosopher recognized his society had barely begun to answer this question. Robert Kocik’s extraordinary work—work I dare not call merely “interdisciplinary” or “hybrid”—demonstrates how we of 2007 have still barely begun to answer the most exigent question of Spinoza’s ethical philosophy.

What would it mean to answer this question—now and forever? Kocik’s 2001 book, *Overcoming Fitness*, along with Giorgio Agamben’s recent texts about biological states of exception, Madeline Gins’ barely read *Helen Keller or Arakawa*, and Jalal Toufic’s *(Vampires)* are significant leaps in the right ethological directions. In an age of failing theoretical discourse, unrigorous experimentalism, and disembodied activism we must turn our skills increasingly to inventing whole new ways of thinking and being in order to account for the mistakes of history, and to make fates reversible, thus disasterous (where dis-aster, literally, is that which is fateless, without constellation, plan or foreclosed end). Where Gins/Arawaka would forage in radical empiricism and architectural practices towards a body immortally perceptive, Kocik projects his own decision "not to die"—that is, against “sudden advantages which may keep us from succumbing to the soft genocide of almighty gradualism”*; what Walter Benjamin called “mere life” —through a work for spiritual and physical well-being opposed the fitnesses of ruthless social competition, exploitation of resources, perpetual war in the names of “peace” and “defense”—hypostatic mediocrities of aesthetisized and anaesthetized *is*. To overcome fitness is to accelerate a deadly cultural symptomology to make immanent and imminent more affirmative ones, new matrices of desire for genetic-becoming beyond phylogeny and ontogeny alike; it is also (once again to use the terminology of Arakawa/Gins) to decide not to die, where decision would seem a good unto itself in its affirmation of “not”—what is consequentially potentializing, however unforeseen.

After Kocik, we should address any number of voids. The voids of all that we do not understand or know about our bodies—our bodies our voids?—and what is still quaintly called “the soul”. The primary void of our era is that of a common gene pool. It is the absence of a sufficient spiritual grounding to approach the present genetic void that terrifies me, and puts Kocik to his work. In the face of genetic void, Kocik has begun to invent a total spiritual technology enfolding “hard” science and “soft” science alike—empirical research, cultural study, and aesthetic sensibility. This spiritual technology Kocik calls “subtle science” or the “prosodic body”:

"I’m subtlizing fitness. It’s very simple. (Like Blake’s ‘mental, not corporeal war’) Not social fitness, not surgical fitness, but subtle fitness. An inquiry into human properties so arduous and unforgiving that those properties are brought to light where light upon them literally places these inborn properties (the sum of which is our nature) pliably in our hands. ‘Subtle’ refers to the malleable phase wherein constitutions may be denatured and remade by means of attention and unconditional love. Safe synthetics, to say the least. Under subtle fitness, all the attention typically devoted to the ingraining of the habits of survival shifts to physiological points where our fundamental properties are both heritable and open to influence—where the Original (which we had been surviving on) can be re-written. Where myths—like good triumphing over evil—can be made. Perhaps the myth of *the selection of the most delightful*.

And just as the beatitudes were at first strictly symbolic, subtle fitness will first be established in spirit. Once the subtle pathways are opened and understood, the gross pathways can then become identified and researched materially—prosodically, medically, environmentally, economically."

To practice subtle science, as I understand it, is to inform a groundwork before a world of relation, practical action and result. In my own work, as well as Kocik’s, we may locate a shared subtle science, among other places, in Medieval theosophies, and especially the angelologies confluent among Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Does Kocik’s work not revive late-Gnosticism as a Platonism without guarantee? A beatitude of literal Theogonies? A void swerving for a practical l’Esprit de Corps?

"Are there glorious states without fitness? Undeserving and elated? Gratuitous and undying? Aren’t vulnerability and hunger advantageous too (Athens became a philosophical power only after losing its navy)?

That’s precisely what blessedness does—it overcomes fitness. The beatitudes, pronounced by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, brought invaluable symbolic liberation. The democratization of happiness. Woe to the rich for they have already got all they’re ever going to git.

But the beatitudes themselves have only begun to materialize rather recently—applying themselves not to otherworld or kingdom come but to current socio-economic conditions. Since 1525 when Thomas Muntzer caught cannonballs with his bare hands while leading the Peasant Revolt we’ve been in a period of material beatification. The Last Judgment is for the living."

While Kocik’s work encourages obsolescence, mis- and dis- use, it also remains entirely useful and generative in what it can do. Perhaps it is generative in ways similar to disability. For to disable is finally to show how something works by how it doesn’t—it is “knockout” as Kocik puts it; more so, however inadvertently or fortuitously, disability posits the subject at the indiscernible points, the blindspots, where a technology—that which works, or functions all-too-well—has failed to maintain its instrumentality in relation to a user for whom the existence of that technology would otherwise recede in use. A tragic failure to privilege disability I find echoed in Augstine’s lament, which Kocik quotes throughout Overcoming Fitness: "if only they had found a use for the world without using it." To become prosodic body, then, is to occupy those obscure locations, place holders, purchases and pivots where “I” is not any longer I because it won’t work—so is unmade, inoperative, disabled, and thusly substantiated.

Why prosody and not poetry? How overcome poetics itself as fitness, more over? These terminological distinctions (poetry vs. prosody) are crucial to approaching Kocik’s project adequately, as well as to put it to use. Where “poetry” (so called) has failed to embody a whole life—actual and potential, plenitudinal and inplenitudinal; where it has failed to become connative in a world for all created (Spinoza); where it has become, mainly, cynical and ignorant about its own potential to transform spiritual existence materially, prosody would instead “outsource” the poet to other fields, disciplines, modes, practices, involvements, liaisons, locals to reclaim inactive making and active unmaking for larger universes of concern.

"Poetry Outsource
DEFINITION Poets ‘placing’ themselves by pursuing new roles, omitted modes of operation and revenue generation at once provides perfect architectural specifications for a location out of which such modes may be facilitated. Outsource simply means taking the role of the poet out into society in novel and necessary ways as well as taking into poetry concerns, resources, substances and practices ordinarily considered extrinsic to poetry."

Robert Kocik returns recently (about 8 years ago as far as I can tell), like a George Oppen or Laura Riding Jackson before him, from a necessary hiatus from poetry as merely “literary” or versifying. After studying with Robert Duncan and others in San Francisco in the early 80’s, Kocik gave up writing poetry (or at least publishing what he’d written) to translate the work of others from French into English, as well as to construct objects, structures and inhabitable spaces. Such a renunciation of poetics as “literary” (that is, cynical and elitist), or concerned mainly with language as rhetoric or manner, I find encouraging and heroic, if not perhaps the only means by which one should claim the name “poet” any more. Having “outsourced” himself for so long, Kocik is back with new work furthering prosodic embodiment, his book *Rhurubarb* with Jonathan Skinner’s Field Press, and a forthcoming essay with Andrew Levy and Roberto Harrison’s Crayon, "Stessogony". Tonight we celebrate his ongoing efforts…

*unless otherwise noted, all quotation is taken from Robert Kocik's *Overcoming Fitness*

A Formal Feeling

~ for Jocelyn Saidenberg & David Brazil

A Formal Feeling

I had to have it all when you were here
As a mind had it the sight sifted to air
Resembling something resolved by pain

Some object relation or other the fingers
In the mouth face just a swish mark of which night pans
Templates for a wound in medias res

You ground me in what we could not be
You place the letter of the unconscious in a box
I can’t see shook it up the delivery being false.

*

Solarization

Call off your men
The dog park is closed
You write “Faggot” and “Jew”
Where nothing was permitted

Because everything *is*
Legions rose up
By some power of image
To solarize their "lack of lack".

*

Nail House

It was a house in a ditch
Like our sex third fourth fifth
It treated the air
Around it like it was privileged dirt
This was called history
But nothing will be saved

This was called Sylvan
Animal unfree open terrible
The promises our weapons
Don’t fail to keep
The living didn’t live for want
Of consequence the dead
Could not die
We must teach them.

Fictions of Consequence

for Robert Kocik

"I had to believe in belief"
~ Robert Creeley

Hold barely the green invisible here no
One but everywhere currently hides a kind

Of life meter a foothold under and over
The grass where our genes were signature
This being submerged desire for what

Never was what behavior action obviously
We was subtracted from what faith in this.


"The more so all have it" push the wrong
Will around inoperatives in all singing into
This preposterousness limbs phantom

Capital was such these global kin of ghosts
Crying use what's the use how to use
Anything the world without using it there

Is no one free but in the heart older desires
When we were young or thoughts of uprising
What won't we be these hands must make


In the eyes a culture in the ears an animal
When it wasn't I we built something spirit

Was a technology without a plan the soul
Was a body your dance suddenly cleaved
Talk not of the mind neither of any body we

Had to not exist first before anything could
Get done meanwhile we decided to overcome.

A Nonsite

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César Vallejo (Remix)*

His desire for desire ever
To help the killer kill a
Whole wailing cathedral on
The edge of no desire

In the presence of a mile
Thick spirit dealing with
A helmet/skull/shard/scalp
If I had used the word
Stench revealing all of his
Choices in English with
-out being able to dodge

Any one the never we fail
To penetrate by a self I have
Created to mime life not only
As it is but psyche as it is not
Forgive us Lord how little
We have died if you're missing
Something here it is an even

Better Jesus from a great yolk
Man suffers you God is he
That I am alive that I am bad
With what ability does one stay
Dead they always died of life

And yet I arrive I reach myself
An exuberant political will to
Desire to mend the children and
The genuses the celebrated edge
Of violence that you were living
On nothing and dying from everything.

*all text transcribed and ordered after The Poetry Project's tribute to César Vallejo, trans. Clayton Eshelman.

The Unsalvageable*

~ for Beth Beer Cuddy, Terry Cuddy and Eliza Newman-Saul

Visions come to everyone a voice made “soft white blue”
In the mineral light over water the place your body shone
A finger lake certain ways of place in our talk if we would

Keep talking what would we do if there is a God it comes
Down here for a little while into the head hit with a shovel
Where force wasn’t before speaks to the body out-of-body

--unexperiencing this

A nonsite above our head yours the place where you led
Yourself the families to freedom history is this head float-
ing in the CNN aether made distant by effects we can see

The outlines but not the letters more radiant for themselves
More than anything we can make them say a weariness of
Every monument a wreck of eyes for history mantles us

--seeing the beyond in

Your own devotions in this Terry older effects of print affect
Us substances it is not what words say that was interesting
But what saying does appearing as such with us so constitutive.

*

On the road for you
And us this water
Gap crossing our shared

Name a country between
Voices honing place
A pit stop forever

Yours when we were
Slower modes you
Started to tell a story

Our lips were a nipple
Around a similar sound
I’ll write though this

Instead you’ll talk to
A stutter what words
Can’t come between.

*

This highway today
America I feel

We feel so
Far away what

Was refused the
News of it

Wasn’t even enough
Nothing to point

To but to
Feel it happening

This country in
The trees framed

Falser for what
We can see

The first cherry
Or magnolia lining

Nothing what does
That water sparkling

Green say about
The water elsewhere.

*

Like sound. the bees
Disappeared. two thirds of
Them. the. real hum. of
Their honey. we want
The body to. point to

Parse the body. even. if the
Body is. still. a corpse
We can’t. even find
The corpses. their stench
So should. the. real suffice.


*

Nostalgia is not a groundwork
For this video no face will be

Healed by lines color hovers
For her eyes like a grief of names

Never given so unsalvagable
Did they open to this distance.



*

What man’s guts given out
Into the diegesis we go
Social within what is shared

And not shared apart as one
Is all occurrence was out-
side his random death a cit-

izen spilling being's mere
fact “All is lost. What’s
the use”--loss *is* the use.


*the above image is from Terry Cuddy's *The Harriet Complex*